Brian Fung

AT&T's recently announced deal to acquire Time Warner reflects massive changes in media and technology. Although regulators could challenge the acquisition or slap conditions on it that may limit how AT&T can use its new assets, the purchase hints at a future where a single company can monetize the same customer multiple times over, just through the customer's routine use of the Internet. If AT&T succeeds — and that's still a big if — it will be that much closer to turning its subscribers into virtual cash machines, going to them over and over to grow its revenue base. Here are a few ways that could work:

Sell connectivity: At its core, AT&T is a network company. Its main job until now has been to sell you access to communications, such as phone or Internet service. These services act as conduits to the information or media you can find once you're hooked as a subscriber.
Sell content: On top of selling you the network, companies such as AT&T increasingly want to sell you the content that travels over those networks — including shows like “Game of Thrones” or “Westworld.”
Sell advertising: This is the big one. Advertising, particularly of the targeted variety, forms the cornerstone of the entire Internet economy. And Internet providers want a big slice of it.
Sell your data: A company, such as AT&T, could put your data to work for its own advertising business. But it could also benefit by sharing your data with marketing firms and other third parties who can use that information themselves.

After rolling out its Fiber product in about a dozen cities, Google is hitting pause on its project to deploy superfast Internet across the country. The news may come as a disappointment to those who were hoping the search giant would bring competition and faster speeds to their area. So, what happened? Here are a few explanations:

Financial pressure from higher-ups: Like many of its siblings in the broader Alphabet family, Google Fiber is likely feeling the heat from top executives who are trying to show investors that their money is being well spent.
Not enough demand: Just like Google Glass — the company's ill-fated attempt to build an augmented-reality visor — Google Fiber may be just a little ahead of its time.
Big incumbents made Google's job harder: Google had an unenviable task in many of its chosen cities: It had to compete with large, established broadband providers who were already there or could benefit from regulations that raised the bar for new entrants.
Providing bundled TV is expensive: There was another major cost Google had to account for when offering its Fiber service. Americans love their double- or triple-play bundles, which reduce the cost of buying Internet from traditional providers.
Wireless broadband is the future: Even as Google Fiber pays lots of money to lay down cables and secure access to TV programming, a different type of technology is coming down the pike: wireless fiber.

AT&T's $85.4 billion purchase of one of America's top media conglomerates could radically reshape the digital economy, making the deal's next step — regulatory review — hugely important to the way consumers access their media. But missing from the process could be the Federal Communications Commission, a key player in the battery of megadeals to hit the market recently.

The Justice Department is likely to analyze whether the transaction could hurt competition, and it could impose requirements on AT&T that might restrain anticompetitive practices stemming from the deal. The FCC, as the nation's top telecom, cable and broadband regulator, could seek to impose different — but no less important — conditions. But the FCC's involvement hinges on whether Time Warner sells certain assets to AT&T.

If the FCC is excluded from the process, it could weaken regulators' ability to prevent harm to competition, said Gene Kimmelman, a former Justice Department antitrust official who is now president of the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. “The kinds of things I can think of that would potentially prevent anticompetitive behavior may include detailed regulatory oversight that DOJ is not inclined to engage in — and doesn't think it has the capacity to engage in,” he said. “They may be tools that are not available without the FCC being involved.”

The FCC generally has a say in acquisitions that involve the sale of assets regulated by the agency. This may include, for example, TV stations owned by one of the two companies. But in the deal involving AT&T and Time Warner, no such assets may change hands. Time Warner owns just one Atlanta-based TV station, and it has not announced whether the station will be sold to AT&T. The station could be spun off and excluded from the deal — which would also eliminate any reason for the FCC to become involved, said Rich Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG

AT&T's $85.4 billion megadeal to acquire Time Warner is an unprecedented bid to diversify the telecom giant as network operators nationwide scramble to marry their communications pipes with exclusive content. For many of these firms, it's no longer enough to be the conduit to TV shows, films and other creative media. A growing number of them want to be making money from the production and cross-promotion of content, too.

Against this backdrop is Verizon, AT&T's biggest rival in the wireless industry, which has made its own moves toward gaining access to content. But some analysts say the outlook for Verizon is beginning to look gloomier. “You've got the big-league players, and you've got the second-string players,” said Jeff Kagan, an independent telecom analyst. “Verizon — the moves they've made, they make it look more like a second-string player.”

Trump's transition team has tapped Jeffrey Eisenach, a visiting scholar at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, for advice on tech and telecom policy. A closer look at Eisenach's policy papers signals how Trump might try to shape the digital economy of the future, should he be elected as president.

Eisenach thinks there may be legitimate concerns about Internet providers wielding their "market power", but he doesn't believe network neutrality rules are the right way to address them. In fact, he views net neutrality more as a regulatory gift to online businesses who lobbied hard for the rules. "It is best understood as an effort by one set of private interests [the tech industry] to enrich itself by using the power of the state to obtain free services from another [Internet providers]," Eisenach told a Senate committee in 2014, "a classic example of what economists term 'rent seeking.'" Eisenach and Trump are both pointing to a system that, in a sometimes flawed manner, allows businesses and wealthy individuals to extract gains by outmaneuvering their fellow peers in the policy arena. This view basically holds that so long as the system is set up this way, it is perfectly legitimate to seek out advantages within it; the government just shouldn't grant any new ones. On net neutrality, for example, Eisenach's preferred approach is to forgo any proactive regulation, letting companies and regulatory agencies duke out their disputes with big lawsuits. This should also please Trump, a businessman who has not been shy about litigation.

Reporting has uncovered extensive ties between Donald Trump and Russia. Trump has made little secret of his personal admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he has praised as having "great control over his country." The Republican presidential nominee even appeared to openly solicit Russian hacking of Hillary Clinton's e-mails — to the point that critics have accused him of treason. So it may seem surprising to hear the Trump campaign suddenly change its tone on Russia over an obscure battle on Internet policy.

Taking a swipe at Russia's support for Internet censorship, a Trump policy adviser warned Sept 21 against giving the Kremlin too much say in how the Internet should be governed. The statement reads like a snub to Putin — that is, until you realize that Trump's own policy could wind up giving the Russian leader precisely what he wants. According to critics, Trump's call to stop the transition would actually wind up helping Putin rather than undermining the Russian leader. "If the US is forced to abort the transition now it would play right into the hands of authoritarian states," said Milton Mueller, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "'Look,' they will say, 'the US wants to control the Internet. Why can’t we?'"

New York City's free Internet kiosks are getting a big downgrade after the company that operates them said users were hogging the on-street machines to watch movies and pornography. A spokesperson for LinkNYC said that no filter is perfect and that it's difficult to strike a balance between blocking content that some people might deem innocuous and maximizing the kiosks' usefulness to members of the public. The spokesperson said that LinkNYC faced a bigger problem: People are overturning newspaper boxes and pulling up chairs in front of the kiosks to settle in, keeping others from using the devices. The company said it is weighing policies that might prevent the nuisance, such as time limits and cooldown periods where the kiosk's Web browsing feature becomes inactive. While that could deter some from abusing the tablets, it may also make life more difficult for the next people who want to use them.

SpaceX is reeling after an early-morning explosion took out its rocket on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral. The incident is a major setback for chief executive Elon Musk. But odds are the tragic news is disappointing another U.S. tech billionaire, too. The rocket destroyed Sept 1 was bearing a satellite that Facebook intended to use to beam Internet access to developing nations. When the rocket went up in smoke, so did the cargo inside, according to SpaceX.

In 2015, Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said he was eager to use the AMOS-6 satellite to deliver broadband connectivity to hard-to-reach parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Facebook has some 84 million users in the region. "As I'm here in Africa, I'm deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX's launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent," Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. "Fortunately, we have developed other technologies like Aquila that will connect people as well."

Companies such as Google and Facebook thrive on your personal data — the bits of information that tell advertisers how old you are, what brands you like and how long you lingered on that must-see cat video. Historically, how these companies use this data has been subject to oversight by the Federal Trade Commission, the government's top privacy watchdog. But a big court defeat for the FTC is putting the agency's power to protect your online privacy in jeopardy, analysts say. The ruling could wind up giving Google and Facebook, not to mention other companies in the Internet ecosystem, the ability to escape all consumer-protection actions from the FTC, and possibly from the rest of government, too, critics claim, unless Congress intervenes.

In the wake of the setback, the FTC is mulling an appeal — which would mean either asking for a rehearing at the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, or escalating to the Supreme Court, according to a person close to the agency. But unless regulators can persuade the courts to overturn Aug 29's decision, the result will be "a fatal blow" to consumer protection, said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.

With the 2016 Summer Olympics now a memory, it's time to look back at how Americans took in all that sports coverage. How we watched the Rio games can tell us a lot about the current state of media and technology and give us insights on trends in mobile device adoption and cord-cutting. Mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, accounted for almost 20 percent of the Aug 10 Olympics stream. An additional 17 percent went to set-top boxes, such as Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV. Of these, Roku boxes were the overwhelming favorite among Olympics viewers, eating up a 10 percent share. In the end, however, PCs took the prize, accounting for more than 60 percent of that night's consumption.

IPhones, Android devices and iPads account for almost one-third of general Internet consumption, a large discrepancy from the Olympic numbers. Analysts say this discrepancy highlights the particular way in which Americans could access their Olympics coverage online. To watch the Internet live stream, viewers needed to log in through their cable subscription. The downside to this meant being chained to a cable provider, but the upside was that once you authenticated you could watch from any device — mobile or otherwise. Add to that the dismal reviews of NBC's mobile streaming app and you have a powerful incentive to watch from a laptop. Although much of our media consumption is increasingly shifting toward mobile devices, live-stream events such as the Olympics may be one area where PCs could remain dominant for some time.